brief history of Empire-realism in the US
<SmirkS>
> This means that the United States has troops in 70 percent of the
> world's countries. The average American could probably not locate half
> of these 135 countries on a map.
the average american doesn't know who dick cheney is.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/15/opinion/polls/main606469.shtml
"One surprise: Bush’s running mate, Vice President Dick Cheney, still
remains unknown to many voters even after more than three years in office."
(with thanks to doug grant for a post without a link that lead to the link)
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U.S. Aims for World Domination?
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p201
As early as 1939, political and economic elites, in collaboration with the
executive branch of government, began planning the permanent expansion of
the military in order to make possible systematic U.S. intervention in the
Third World.
p201
In October 1940 one CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] study group bluntly
declared its purpose "to set forth the political, military, territorial and
economic requirements of the United States in its potential leadership of
the non-German world area including the United Kingdom itself as well as
the Western Hemisphere and Far East." The same memorandum indicated that
from the start the policy planners considered a permanent military
establishment not as an instrument to deter aggression, but as an
instrument of empire building. It declared that the "foremost requirement
of the United States in a world in which it proposes to hold unquestioned
power is the rapid fulfillment of a program of complete rearmament." In
1939, elites thought that German hegemony over Europe might be tolerable,
but Japanese competition in the Far East was not.
p202
The elites planning postwar foreign policy conceived a world in which
American interests might be compatible with a continental Europe controlled
by the Nazis; after all, many U.S. leaders regarded Hitler as a useful
check on the Soviet Union, and some admired him.
p202
... the Economic and Financial Study group of the CFR
If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-
American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the
world. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of
Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a
better propaganda effect.
p202
... the CFR and the State Department continued to refine their plans for
the postwar period. The work was carried out in secret because both the
Council and the State Department recognized that public knowledge of U.S.
plans to dominate the Third World (as it was later to be called) could harm
America's relationships with other nations that were helping in the fight
against the Axis.
p202
George Kennan - in a top-secret memorandum drafted in 1946
"We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its
population....We cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our
real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without
positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to
dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming, and our attention will
have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We
need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism
and world benefaction."
p203
Lt. Colonel John Bacevich, a West Point graduate and International Affairs
Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relataions, described the motives of
U.S. foreign policy in 1986:
"We can see today that the Army's primary task down to the present has
continued to be precisely what it was in Korea: the application of force to
maintain the global status quo that emerged from World War II. While the
United States does not claim a formal empire...the Army since 1945 has
played the historical role of an imperial defense force, called on
repeatedly to protect far-flung American interests threatened by global
brush fires by the winds of political change."
Bacevich said that the Army should plan to act as an interventionist force
instead of maintaining the fiction that it existed to provide national
security. But this would have to be presented to the public "inoffensively,
using terms suited to American political discourse" because "an American
Army proclaiming itself to be an imperial police force would have
difficulty garnering public or congressional support. That statement holds
as true today as it would have for the 1950s."
p204
The institutionalization of militarism under the guise of national security
was a logical expression of the aspirations articulated by the Council of
Foreign Relations before and during the Second World War. This development
was recognized by the historian Charles Beard, who charged in 1948 that
Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately led the nation to war and knowingly
violated the Constitution to do so. Beard warned at that time that
Madisonian principles of checks and balances were in Jeopardy and that the
executive branch would gain control of foreign policy and war making in the
postwar period through the expansion of state secrets.
p205
... many right-wing policy makers in the United States continued to feel
sympathy for the Nazis.
p205
[The Smith Act of 1940 and the InternalSecurity Act of 1950] together with
the National Security Act of 1947 ... remain as the cornerstone of the
government's authority to suppress internal dissent under the guise of
national security.
p206
Military planners and political leaders realized that implementing this
grand design would require mobilizing the American people into a permanent
state of quasi-war. Accordingly, an emotional substitute for an official
state of war would have to be devised. In 1944, Charles E. Wilson,
president of General Electric and later Director of Defense Mobilization
under President Truman and Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower,
warned in an internal memo that
"the revulsion against war not too long hence will be an almost insuperable
obstacle for us to overcome. For | that reason, I am convinced that we must
begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent war economy."
p206
Almost forty years later, Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense
under Ronald Reagan, argued that
"democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of
a sense of danger. And every time we create the impression that we and the
Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish that
sense of apprehension."
p207
in 1956, when Eisenhower agreed to establish an ad hoc committee of private
citizens to study a proposal for the government to spend $40 billion over a
number of years to erect shelters to protect the population from nuclear
fallout. The committee, composed of businessmen and academic specialists
with close ties to military personnel and large defense contractors, was
chaired by H. Rowan Gaither, a lawyer who was also chair of both the Ford
Foundation and the Air Force's main "think tank," the Rand Corporation in
California. Almost all members of the committee were private consultants to
the National Security Council.
The committee took upon itself the task of expanding its mission beyond
Eisenhower's mandate by investigating other uses for the $40 billion. When
finished, the "Gaither Report" used the same arguments originally advanced
in NSC 68 to argue for a military buildup and to accuse the Eisenhower
administration of "complacency" in the face of the Soviet "threat." It
exerted pressure on the administration to maintain not only the capability
to initiate a nuclear war, but to undertake covert actions against
guerrilla insurgencies and to fight a large-scale conventional war. It
advocated a boost in military spending to $48 billion per year, $10 billion
more than the amount recommended by the Eisenhower administration. The
committee said that
"military "needs," irrespective of domestic priorities, should henceforth
be identified as the standard for determining the Pentagon's budget."
p208
Today, over 30,000 companies are engaged in military production. During the
Second World War, production was carried out in 1,600 federally owned
plants; only fifty-eight currently are owned by the government. Each year,
more than 15 million contracts (over 52,000 each day) are signed between
government and private companies. In fiscal 1985, the United States spent
almost $1,100 per person on the military, in contrast to its European
allies, which spent an average of $250 per person. In the mid-1980s, about
$146 billion in private military business was generated by the Pentagon
each year. During the Reagan administration, spending for military research
increased 62 percent above the rate of inflation, while funding for
civilian research fell by 10 percent.
p209
... the militarization of the economy has created a complex system of
dependence on military spending that will not easily be broken. Only nine
of the 3,041 counties in the United States received less than $1,000 from
the Defense Department in 1984. With so many constituents on the military
payroll, few congressional representatives can afford to attack waste and
fraud vigorously or to I challenge the Pentagon s priorities without fear
of retribution. In 1983, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger accused
Congress of tacking nearly $3 billion worth of unnecessary items onto the
Pentagon budget. [1990] Roughly 3,275,000 jobs in the United States are in
defense industries, up from 314,000 in 1940. There are almost 1.5 million
military retirees in addition to the 3,295,000 people on the civilian and
active military payrolls. The link between corporations and the military is
solidified by the retention of retired officers as employees of private
contractors. Employed by 157 major military contractors were 1,350 former
high-ranking military officers, plus 316 former high-ranking officials of
the Defense Department.
p209
The considerable influence of the military-industrial complex with Congress
has been reinforced by the system of campaign financing. Political action
committees representing the largest twenty defense contractors increased
their contributions 225 percent during the first six years of the Reagan
administration.
p210
From 1965 to 1975, the U.S. spent between $159.4 billion (DOD's estimate)
and $239.6 billion (U.S. Senate estimate) on the war. The 14,392,302 tons
of explosives (more than used against Japan in the Second World War) left
more than 25 million craters in a country smaller than the state of
California and reduced all North Vietnamese cities south of Hanoi to
rubble. More than 400,000 tons of napalm and 19 million gallons of
herbicides (including 11 million gallons of Agent Orange) were used to
destroy the croplands and half the forests in the country. Some 58,655 U.S.
troops were killed. More than 2,000,000 Vietnamese-one-ninth of the
population-were killed.
p210
The [Vietnam] antiwar protests threatened to mushroom into a broader
movement for social change that might have knit together civil rights
activists, feminists, the youth movement, and liberal elements in the labor
unions and the Democratic party. This was too high a price to pay for
continuing the war.
p212
Since 1981, an avalanche of literature on so-called "low-intensity
conflict" has emanated from military planners and conservative theorists.
"Low-intensity conflict"-or "peaceful engagement"-the new phrase favored by
the Bush administration-are euphemisms for wars conducted in Third World
countries out of sight of the American public which rely on hired
mercenaries clandestinely working at the direction of the CIA (this way
American soldiers do not die, which upsets the public).
p213
Sam Sarkesian, an academic specialist who chairs the Interuniversity
Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, asserts that revolution is inherently
undemocratic and that counterrevolution must therefore "develop [its] own
morality and ethics that justify any means to achieve success. Survival is
the ultimate morality." This means that the United States must sometimes
support sides in conflicts in which "all of the ingredients for a 'dirty',
ungentlemanly, terror-oriented conflict are there; and it is likely to be
protracted and increasingly costly." As a consequence, "American policy may
support nondemocratic regimes in the name of democracy."
p213
In 1982, CIA operatives were caught mining Nicaraguan harbors and
newspapers published the contents of a CIA manual used to train the contras
to carry out sabotage and assassination against civilian targets. Congress
reacted by enacting restrictions on CIA involvement in Nicaragua. The
administration found a way around the law in the Special Forces, which were
coordinated from the National Security Council. The Special Forces employ
and train terrorists to carry out acts of violence for political purposes.
The victims are not armed opponents but civilians. To prevent these victims
from appearing as statistics in State Department human rights reports,
civilian victims of the Salvadoran military and Nicaraguan contras were
categorized as legitimate military targets in flagrant violation of
international human rights treaties to which the United States is a
signatory.
p214
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S. military had nearly
collapsed as an effective institution during the Vietnam War. Over 1,000
commissioned and noncommissioned officers were "fragged"-that is,
assassinated-by their troops. There were more mutinies and refusals to
engage in combat than in any previous American war. According to official
Army figures, 28 percent of troops in Vietnam used hard drugs such as
heroin and cocaine. The quality of the officer corps declined.
p215
To protect political allies in Thailand and elsewhere, the CIA guarded
poppy fields and transported heroin on one of its "company" airlines, Air
America.
p215
In fiscal year 1986, the four branches of the military spent over $1.8
billion on recruitment, an average of nearly $5,400 for each of 333,600
recruits, $1,400 more than the average for the previous year...There were
about 15,000 military recruiters, one for every 185 high school seniors in
the country. In 1986, there were 227,448 high school students enrolled in
Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, compared to a total of 287 twenty
years earlier. The Pentagon spent $52.1 million on texts, arms, ~ and
uniforms for these students.
p215
On college campuses, students must now prove that they have registered with
the Selective Service to receive financial aid. With tuition rising and
nonmilitary aid falling, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) becomes
an increasingly attractive option.
p216
In 1977, Thomas Carr, Director of Defense Education under President Carter,
asserted that military service was becoming an increasingly important means
for socializing young people:
By 1984, given the involvement of such a large proportion of our young
people with military service, the military will have become a major
instrument for youth socialization-assuming a large portion of the role
once dominated by the family, church, the school, and the civilian work
setting.
p216
[In 1987] Lt. Col. Oliver North and other members of a secret Reagan
administration task force had formulated a plan to suspend the Constitution
and declare martial law in the event of either urban riots or widespread
domestic opposition to a military intervention. In such a case, national
government control was to be transferred to the Federal Emergency
Management Agency and military commanders would have been appointed to run
state and local governments.
p217
[Oliver] North, who had begun his career in Vietnam, understood that
successful prosecution of a land war in Central America would almost surely
require suppression of dissent at home. Part of his plan for accomplishing
the necessary repression would have involved the establishment of
internment camps, similar to those used during the Second World War to
incarcerate American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
p218
If In the face of an increasingly complex, well-coordinated, and insulated
national security apparatus, the information available for public debate
about foreign affairs becomes subject to an overwhelming degree of
manipulation. Decisions are carried out in secret and the volume of state
secrets has mushroomed with every presidential administration. After
decisions are made behind closed doors, strategies are devised about how to
manipulate mass opinion in favor of decisions or actions already
undertaken. Domestic electoral decisions do not lead to governmental
policies. Instead, public opinion campaigns are orchestrated to build
support for decisions already reached.
p221
The overriding concern of U.S. elites has been the construction and
maintenance of a system of governments that will protect inequality and
class privilege at least as effectively as in the United States. When
President Reagan said in 1982, "What I want to see above all else is that
this country remains a country where someone can always get rich and stay
rich-that's the thing we have that must be preserved," he was expressing in
unusually candid terms a sacred tenant of America's political tradition.
The nations within the orbit of the empire have been subjected to
devastating doses of violence coordinated by U.S. corporations and
government officials when they have failed to demonstrate allegiance to the
same principle.
p223
Major General Smedley D. Butler, 1935
I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our
country's most agile military force-the Marine Corps....I spent most of my
time being a high-muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism...
Thus I helped make Mexico...safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys
to collect revenues in....I helped purify Nicaragua for the International
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the
Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make
Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903.
p243
Elites "sponsor" elections within the U.S. in a manner similar to the way
they "sponsor" them abroad: to legitimate rule by the rich and well born
and to preserve a system of class privilege. If elections are used for any
other purpose, they are labeled as fraudulent and heavy doses of terrorism
are frequently applied to nullify their results. Elites have not employed
these tactics within the United States-that is, they have not overturned
democratic institutions and processes, as they have so often done
elsewhere. They have not found it necessary to do so because elections
within their own country have never escaped their control.
p248
It should be understood that the campaign "industry," like other
industries, is dominated by corporations, it runs on money, and the
participants expect to make a profit. Money and politics always have been
intimately entwined in American politics. In the age of electronic mass
media, the relationship between money brokers and politicians is tighter,
possibly, than at any previous period in our national history.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Democracy_America/Democratic_Facade.html
--
TheTruthHurts.